is it possible to buy and sell bc, as quickly as one buy and sell stocks (aka speculating)? last time I checked there were ways but it would take some user verification process to buy, and selling seemed to be very well hidden.
Sure, most exchanges have an API you can use to automate your trading. The verification is a one-time thing, once you're past that you can trade as quickly as you want.
You can on e.g. gdax, but Bitcoin isn't intended as a high volume trading platform; it handles about 15 transactions per second, and right now there's a backlog of over 200.000 unconfirmed transactions. I'm fairly sure coinbase / gdax has like its own transaction log, guaranteeing that you will get X btc for Y price at the moment you make the transaction, even if the transfer to your own (offline) wallet could take a while.
Blocks take approximately 10 minutes, assuming your transaction is on the first block. In a way that might put some brakes on high speed trading, though it could still be automated.
